That book is so garbage, psudoscientific, empirically wrong, sinophobic, and I'm probably forgetting a bunch.
Also lol to it's explanation for no beasts of burden in Africa. Sorry, folks have actually mostly domesticated the zebra. The explanations for why Zebra's were not domesticated after all this time are a massive cope. Even worse copes are the non recognition/misunderstandings of Elephant usage in large numbers for warfare / burden from Africa to India,
"It is possible that having evolved under pressure from the many large predators of Africa, including early humans, they became more aggressive, thus making domestication more difficult.[104] However, zebras have been trained throughout history. In Rome, zebras are recorded to have pulled chariots during amphitheatre games starting in the reign of Caracalla (198 to 217 AD).[105] In the late 19th century, the zoologist Walter Rothschild trained some zebras to draw a carriage in England, which he drove to Buckingham Palace to demonstrate that it can be done. However, he did not ride on them knowing that they were too small and aggressive.[106] In the early 20th century, German colonial officers in East Africa tried to use zebras for both driving and riding, with limited success."
Oh and also Africa had cattle and donkies and the donkey was actually domesticated in Africa.
West African empires like Mali, Songhai, and the Oyo Empire famously maintained massive cavalry units. They adapted horses to tropical conditions, using them for state-building and warfare long before the arrival of Europeans.
Also uhh Camels!
Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
>Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
Diamond says that the reasons Europeans colonised South America (rather than vice versa) is largely due to geographic factors, not due to any inherent genetic superiority of European over South Americans. I don't see how that is racist. Quite the opposite.
What if it's due to neither environmental nor genetic factors but ideas. Europe was backward until it re-absorbed classical learning and absorbed newer ideas from the Orient, which led to the renaissance and everything that followed. Did Europeans suddenly gain 40 IQ points in that time? No. Did their environment change? No.
For some reason a lot of people have a huge problem with this explanation, actually preferring either environmental determinism or racism. This is in spite of what seems to be a lot of historical evidence for it in the form of causal influence: ideas are introduced somewhere (inventions, methods, philosophies, languages, mathematics, literature, etc.) and large changes follow.
I'm sure it is lots of factors, not just environment/geography.
His entire section/epilogue on "Why China isn't actually a counter example to my whole thesis, tee-hee!!" AKA Chapter 13 literally goes into "well the emperor there had so much power and could unilaterally keep their technology levels down with stupid trade restrictions so that's why Europeans put them through the century of humiliation and eclipsed them!" and other nonsense is straight up massive Sinophobia and very racist.
Diamond makes broad genetic/intelligence claims about whole populations, rankes societies as "advanced/backward" constantly and describes conquest as inevitable
"in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners"
"modern "Stone Age" peoples are on the average probably more intelligent"
"some societies seem hopelessly conservative, inward looking, and hostile to change."
Actual quotes from this so called bastion of liberalism
"China’s connectedness eventually became a disadvantage" [because] "a decision by one despot could and repeatedly did halt innovation."
China = monolithic, obedient, centralized, despotic, stagnant; Europe = pluralistic, competitive, innovative.
Diamond turns "Chinese authoritarianism" into a transhistorical condition produced by the land itself. I'm all about the LVT and Georgism and all but this is doing too much service for land.
In other words, the old Orientalist story survives perfectly well after the race science has been supposedly removed from the chassis. Better still, Diamond treats Ming maritime policy, imperial bureaucracy, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution as variations on the same ancient geographical bug, as though two thousand years of Chinese politics were basically the Yangtze River repeatedly pressing the "authoritarianism" button with it's floods!!!
> "some societies seem hopelessly conservative, inward looking, and hostile to change."
This rings absolutely true? Do you not think any societies are more hostile to change than others?
Which book would you recommend instead of Diamond's? If nothing exact, what comes to mind?
It's been more than a decade since I have read it, but I remember Diamond writing specifically about the relative lack of domesticable animals in sub-Saharan Africa. Mali, Songhai, and Oyo didn't "[adapt] horses to tropical conditions", they imported already domesticated animals from elsewhere (North Africa). It is telling that none of your examples are in Central or Southern Africa.
Also, domestication is the process of breeding animals over multiple generations to make them more pliable and is not the same as training individual animals to pull a carriage. The very first sentence of the paragraph that you quoted from the Wikipedia article on zebras is "Attempts to domesticate zebras were largely unsuccessful."
Go take a look at where Kenya is located on a map and where Donkey's were first domesticated and tell me that I didn't cover sub-Saharan africa again with a straight face.
That first sentence "attempts were largely unsuccessful" is a cope from wikipedia editors who are mad that it keeps being brought up by race realists who are using this blurb to justify their own racism. Consider that it was a literal Rothschild who did the most recent almost-domestication. 4chan is on this like fly's are on horses (but not Zebra's, or horses painted like Zebras - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-22333-7)
The part I quoted without the unnecessary pre-thinking done with that first sentence is all I need. It was quite possible to get most of the way there over short periods of time with money and effort.
The book in question aside,
> Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
I don't see how this is true, even somewhat? Saying that the environment you're in shapes your culture, progress, and overall development as a society, makes perfect sense. Saying that the environment does not play a huge factor in this leaves open only the option of that development being genetic/hereditary, doesn't it? You'd be blaming the failure or shortcomings of civilizations, current and previous, on the genetic predisposition of their peoples. That feels far more racist to me than saying, "This area did not have X resources in available and sufficient quantities to allow them to develop Y improvement".
I understand that this was often used to justify colonialism, which I want it to be very clear I strongly disagree with. But, it would feel deeply wrong to say that all things are possible to progress in all areas. For example, we could NOT expect some hypothetical area with very poor soil health and little water to become a great improver of early agriculture. Likewise, areas with no easy access to copper, tin, iron, etc, would be unlikely to begin using those resources for farming implements. An area with all of this in abundance would have a much EASIER time developing these things.
I read Guns, Germs and Steel recently and loved it. After finishing it, I was wondering how well the theses had held up in the time since it was published and did some research, and seems like most (though not all) of the major points have held up pretty well or even been strengthened by recent evidence. However, the book seems to have attracted a surprising amount of hate, which this reminds me of! It feels to me like an instinctive hateful backlash to a remarkable achievement, like "crabs in a bucket syndrome" or the Einstein quote -
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”
I think it got a lot of criticism because it was very wide ranging and some experts felt that Diamond was encroaching on their turf. Also it made a lot of sales, which probably provoked some envy. IIRC (some years since I read the book) Diamond made clear that a lot of the ideas were speculative.